11/09/2009 @ 12:00AM

Cisco Software Takes On Microsoft, IBM

If
Cisco
wasn’t making enough enemies with its string of bold acquisitions and a brazen push into the server market last spring, it’s now picking a software fight with several more tech heavyweights:
Microsoft
,
Google
and
IBM
.

On Monday,
Cisco
plans to announce a broad set of new collaboration software tools for instant messaging, e-mail, social networking, videoconferencing, document and video sharing, many of which go head to head with similar offerings from
Microsoft’s
Live Meeting and Exchange messaging products, as well as enterprise collaboration tools from
IBM
.

Most threatening to Microsoft among those announcements, according to Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala, may be a new online e-mail offering that Cisco calls Webex Email, an integration of the Postpath e-mail service it acquired last year with the Webex online conferencing platform it bought in 2007. The goal: to catch Microsoft customers in the middle of their move from the on-premises to cloud-based e-mail offerings and woo them to Cisco’s platform. “If Cisco can catch users in the middle of this transition, it gives them a real shot at this market,” Kerravala says.

Google
and IBM have both launched their own attempts to own the Web-based mail box of the future with Gmail and IBM’s iNotes (See: “IBM Aims To Undercut Gmail“). But Cisco has a new trick: Its software-as-a-service e-mail uses the same protocol as Microsoft Outlook, allowing users to read their e-mail through the same interface that they’re accustomed to, despite the fact that their e-mail will now be hosted on the Web and also viewable through Cisco’s online software from any location. “Users can rip out their exchange server and retain the same experience,” says Murali Sitaram, a Cisco vice president for collaboration products. Cisco declined to reveal the pricing for any of its products ahead of their official launch.

Cisco’s wide-ranging launch extends well beyond e-mail. The company is planning to offer what it calls internally an Enterprise Collaboration Platform, a shared workspace that can be hosted online or within a company’s firewalls for security purposes. The platform will function as a sort of hybrid of Google Apps and Facebook, allowing users to blog or share documents, instant message and video conference.

Like Facebook or other social platforms, the real value of the Enterprise Collaboration Platform will come when third-party developers create more applications for the service, says
Burton Group
analyst Mike Gotta. Cisco is offering an application programming interface to programmers who want to sell their apps through the platform. “Right now it’s really just a plate,” says Gotta. “We’re waiting for the food.”

In the meantime, Cisco has developed some unique applications of its own: A program it’s calling Pulse will mine the platform’s written and verbal data to determine the frequency certain words are written or said within an organization–even, Cisco claims, automatically determining which participants in a conversation are subject matter experts. A business-focused YouTube clone called “Show and Share” will allow users to post and send videos or transcribe them into messages.

Cisco’s video conferencing offerings, one of Chief Executive John Chambers’ favorite topics, are also getting significant tweaks. With its Webex conferencing platform, users will gain the ability to click to make video calls to the company’s so-called “Telepresence rooms”–high-end videoconferencing systems that it sells for as much as $300,000. Those rooms are also gaining new utility: An “any-to-any” function integrated into its Media Experience Engine–a video routing hardware device it began selling last year–will now allow Cisco’s telepresence rooms to communicate with competing video conferencing technologies used by customers’ partners or suppliers, systems sold by
Hewlett-Packard
, Tandberg and Polycomm.

Cisco, of course, is in the midst of a more aggressive attempt to expand its video footprint. In October, it bid $3 billion to acquire Tandberg, an offer the company’s shareholders have so far rejected. (See: “A Guide To Cisco’s Shopping Basket.”)

Whether or not that deal goes through, the Yankee Group’s Kerravala argues that Cisco’s move to open its video systems could spark more interest in the still-underused technology. And greater interest will allow Cisco to sell more of the routers and switches companies need to handle the massive video data loads that high-end video conferencing systems create. He cites Metcalfe’s law, the rule of thumb that a communications technology becomes exponentially more useful as more endpoints are added to the network. “If you want to use these video conferencing systems with other companies today, you have to talk to your IT people and they have to talk with the other IT people, and no one wants to do that,” says Kerravala. “Now it’s much more possible, and usage could go through the roof.”